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Category: August Kubizek

Categories
August Kubizek Lightning and the Sun (book) Racial right

The Lightning

and the Sun, 3

There are, to my knowledge, — unfortunately, — no records of Adolf Hitler’s childhood. And, enlightening as it surely is, the little one can gather about it from a conversation with his most sympathetic old tutor, Herr Mayrhofer, (who is still living in Leonding, near Linz, and whom I met twice) and the little he mentions himself in Mein Kampf (which is not an autobiography) is not enough to buttress such a definite (and unusual) view of him as the one put forth in the present study. The one apparently authoritative picture of the future ruler’s life and character, years before he ‘decided to become a politician,’ is to be found in the very good book in which August Kubizek — the one friend he had in early youth, — has related the story of his four years’ friendship with him, namely from 1904 to 1908.[1]

In those years — i.e., when he was over fifteen, less than nineteen, — Adolf Hitler’s main traits of character were already fixed, and visible at every step of his: in all he said or did. His scale of values was already that one which was, in later years, to set him apart from every political leader of our times. And the psychological (the real) basis of his philosophy the source of his unshakable faith in it, and the key to his whole career, — was already definite. In other words, the man he was to be — the Man he could but be, under the given circumstances, — had already taken shape and was, with the sureness of instinct, with a mysterious, inner knowledge, a logic of his own that baffled all human calculations, invincibly following the path of his tremendous destiny. And the features of the rapidly awakening personality were unmistakably those, and the unfailing, baffling logic, that, of a Man of the type I have, in this book, characterised as ‘against Time’: of an inspired, ruthless and realistic — extraordinarily far sighted — fighter for a Golden Age ideal, in the depth of our Dark Age.

And, were we able to trace the history of Adolf Hitler’s evolution further into those very early years which he describes as providing (from the standpoint of events) ‘little to remember,’[2] it is not only probable but certain that we would find, in him, up to the very beginning of his life, the self-same, deeply distinctive traits of character, the self-same fundamental aspirations — the same person. Such men as he are not, as so many people seem to think, the ‘product of circumstances,’ but predestined beings who use the given circumstances to the utmost, for a purpose which far exceeds the obvious, immediate aim of their action, or, to speak the language of ancient Wisdom, — and one is, ultimately, compelled to speak that language, — great free Souls,[3] no longer bound by the law of birth and rebirth, who choose to be born in the environment (within the race, the country, the social stratum) in which, and to grow into leading men and to struggle as such under the circumstances under which they are to act the most efficiently, in the highest interest of Creation. They are children and adolescents ‘against Time’ before leaving in history the mark of their passage as Men ‘against Time.’

One of the most noticeable traits of people ‘against Time’ — no less than of those I have described as ‘above Time’ — is that they fit nowhere in the world as it is; that their moral and aesthetic — and practical — standards: their conception of happiness and unhappiness, their idea of ‘success’ and failure, and of usefulness, in one word their values, and its, have nothing in common. And, from all that his friend A. Kubizek relates about Adolf Hitler’s adolescence in Linz, that appears precisely to have been the case of the future master of Germany, at that time a no doubt remarkably gifted but, in the estimation of cool-minded grown-ups, ‘unpractical’ youth, who had recently left the middle-school without completing the course of his studies, and nourished the ambition of becoming a great artist — a painter, or perhaps an architect — with little material prospects of fulfilling it, and who lived on his widowed mother’s meagre pension, and roamed about the streets — or the countryside — and occasionally went to the theatre (taking admittedly the cheapest seats,) and made gigantic plans and spoke — already — with compelling eloquence, — of things that interested nobody but himself, while other boys earned their living and helped their families, or were learning something ‘useful.’ ‘He just fitted into no social frame whatsoever,’ concludes A. Kubizek, after having tried to, analyse the reasons why his friend, despite capacities by far above the average, failed, even in subsequent years, to ‘get on’ professionally. ‘He had not the slightest ambition of securing himself a livelihood’ and of being comfortable. He did not wish to be ‘comfortable.’ He did not — and never was to — think in terms of comfort or of personal ‘happiness.’ What others called ‘enjoying life’ was something absolutely foreign to him. Nor could he ‘take things as they came’ and live lightly, free of worry, entirely within the present. He was, at a very early age, intensely aware that things were wrong in the world round him — wrong in every walk of life, in every domain of thought and action, from A to Z, — and he felt himself duty-bound to change them; not to change this or that in them, leaving the rest untouched, but to change them ruthlessly and radically, for they were radically wrong, and to build everything anew, according to principles different from those that had prevailed up till then.

And this was not a mere wish, a more or less vague desire or day-dream. It was a purpose that he pursued with ‘deadly seriousness’ and unfailing consistency, busying himself long before hand with the most minute details of his plans in every particular case, without for all that ever losing sight of the spirit and general lines of his creation as a whole, so much so that that ‘extraordinary seriousness’ and consistency — and merciless radicality — struck all those who knew him as the main trait of his character. He pursued it — nay, already in those years in which he was not yet politically active; already while he himself still believed that art would remain, throughout life, his first and foremost concern — with that feverish impatience which finds its expression in the words: ‘Now, or never’; with the haste inherent in all earnest action ‘against Time.’ And that impatience — that tragic awareness that ‘tomorrow will be too late’ — was to stamp his whole career as a ruler and as the Founder of the last true civilisation within the Dark Age. In it, in fact, lies the source and the explanation of Adolf Hitler’s most drastic — and most criticized — steps in later life and the sign that National Socialism, that most heroic of all reactions against our Dark Age, historically still belongs to this Age, while transcending its spirit.

 

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Editor’s two cents:

…he himself still believed that art would remain, throughout life, his first and foremost concern….

It is here that the gulf between us and American white nationalism becomes apparent. As far as I know, the only American racialist who sensed any of this was Michael O’Meara: who wrote that only a new myth could save us. His readers in a racialist webzine didn’t understand a whit of this, believing that only by smearing data to the normies about race realism or the JQ could one modify the Aryan collective unconscious.

That is not possible for those who know how the mind works!

To use Jungian language, it is all about ‘touching the Self.’ And the royal path toward that direction is through art. Remember how Hitler loved Wagner’s art, or how Parrish’s paintings produced, in me, the eureka moment: This is what Creation (the Big Bang) was for!

The Greco-Romans also knew that displaying the Aryan nude on public thoroughfares through majestic sculptures manifested the Self in the form of the majestic Gods.

The Anglo-Saxon racial right, children of Bentham and not of sculptors, painters or poets, has no idea that what we need is a new religion: a new myth accompanied by a new art! Precisely for this reason all anti-art is a curse for producing the new Aryan awakening, which is why I don’t listen to racialist podcasts that start with degenerate music (to her credit, Uncle Adolf’s other admirer, Carolyn Yeager, never used degenerate music at the beginning or end of her podcasts).

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[1] August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfround [Adolf Hitler, Friend of my Youth] (Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1953.)

[2] Mein Kampf, p. 2.

[3] In Sanskrit, Mukta Purusha.

Categories
August Kubizek Martin Kerr

The NS lifestyle

by Martin Kerr

What does it mean to be a National Socialist?

Certainly, we can say that someone who is in general agreement with the National Socialist worldview, as he or she understands it, is a National Socialist in a formal sense of the term. There are also those who appreciate the NS period in European history, although they may not have a comprehensive ideological understanding of National Socialism. They may be described as being sympathetic to National Socialism, even if their theoretical knowledge of the NS worldview is incomplete.

But to be a true National Socialist in a profound sense means living an NS lifestyle, not just to agree with NS ideas in an abstract manner, or to admire historical National Socialism from a distance.

Hermann Göring once noted that one does not become a National Socialist simply as a matter of intellectual endorsement, but rather that one is born a National Socialist. The NS philosopher Savitri Devi further expanded on this idea:

One does not become a National Socialist. One only discovers, sooner or later, that one has always been one—that, by nature, one could not possibly be anything else. For this is not a mere political label; not an ‘opinion’ that one can accept or dismiss according to circumstances, but a faith, involving one’s whole being, physical and psychological, mental and spiritual: ‘not a new election cry, but a new conception of the world’—a way of life—as our Führer himself has said.

It follows that if being a National Socialist is more than just a political belief, it should condition the way one lives one’s life—that is, that there is a characteristic NS lifestyle. Colin Jordan wrote than a person, “acts as a National Socialist, if he is really and entirely one.”

The first thing that we should point out is that a National Socialist has a positive, “can-do” state of mind. He focuses on the solution to a problem, rather than on the problem itself or on the roadblocks that stand in the way to solving the problem. As Adolf Hitler wrote, “Obstacles exist to be broken, not to be surrendered to.” Lincoln Rockwell said that “Life is struggle,” and that the secret to having a happy and successful life was, “to enjoy the struggle.” This is the fundamental NS attitude towards life in general.

We welcome struggle, not as a necessary evil, but as a great gift and opportunity that allows us to strengthen ourselves mentally, physically and spiritually. Again quoting Hitler: “Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace will it perish.” Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, said, “We must welcome every fight!”

Embracing the struggle-ethic to the fullest has two corollaries. The first of these is that the National Socialist enthusiastically leads an active life. Idle complaint is not National Socialist, nor is sitting around and watching television or fiddling with electronic gadgets hour after hour, day after day. Rather, a National Socialist gets out and engages in the real world. This may take the form of participating in a public activity to build the Movement, or it may simply be going for a hike in the forest. Citing an old Aryan adage, the Führer noted that, “he who rests—rusts” (Wer raset, der rostet).

Do you take the escalator or the stairs? Said Mussolini, “The fascist distains the easy life.” The Duce was not a National Socialist, but in this instance his words are consistent with an NS lifestyle.

The second corollary to embracing an active life is that one accepts a heroic, courageous attitude towards existence and death. A National Socialist knows that there are dangers and hardships in the world, that there is pain, and that someday we all die. Rather than becoming depressed by such a realization, or retreating from the world in a cowardly manner, the National Socialist greets life with joyous fortitude. He steels himself mentally, physically and spiritually against the hardships that he may encounter, with absolute determination to fight through them with manly defiance. The National Socialist resolves to die with a cry of triumph on his lips, not to pass away cowering and whimpering like a beaten dog.

Every National Socialist accepts the SS saying, “Know the laws of life and live accordingly,” as his or her personal motto.

Consequently, exercise, healthy eating, and nourishing the spirit are key features of an NS lifestyle. Just as laziness is un-National Socialist, so is a diet that consists of processed food, nutritionless (or even harmful) snacks, all washed down with some form of alcohol or a sugar-laden soft drink.

Instead, a National Socialist lifestyle includes plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, with as little meat as possible, along with plenty of water and sunshine. He nourishes his soul with Aryan music and art.

Likewise, the National Socialist shuns polluting himself with the degenerate byproducts of an un-Aryan popular culture. These include films that insult the history of the White race, that promote race-mixing, that degrade women or that glorify crime, as well as so-called “music” that offends the Aryan spirit. Likewise, the National Socialist does not contaminate his body and weaken his spirit with drugs and intoxicants.

A while back someone posting on Stormfront claimed that his favorite music was “National Socialist rap.” Let us get this straight once and for all: there is no “National Socialist rap,” nor is there “NS hip-hop” or “Aryan jazz.” We do not insist that 14-year-old Aryan girls forego silly love songs and listen only to Luftwaffe assault marches or German opera—only that Aryans of both sexes and all ages nourish their spirits with musical forms that are produced by, and consistent with, their racial souls.

In so far as possible, the National Socialist lifestyle is family oriented. Just as he views his race as a gigantic extension of his family, so he views his family as his race in miniature. The National Socialist man treats the women and children of his race with respect, dignity and affection. His fundamental attitude towards them is protective and supportive, not hostile and aggressive.

Sadly, many teenage National Socialists living in a non-NS household alienate themselves from their families by attempting to convert their parents to the Hitlerian worldview over Sunday dinner. Tensions between National Socialists and non-National Socialists within a given family are inevitable, but it is the duty of the National Socialist not to let these tensions rend the family apart. Save your efforts at spreading the Good Word to those outside your family. Explain your beliefs if asked, but do not push them on family members.

National Socialists spend as much time outdoors as they can. They garden, go for walks in the woods, and generally enjoy the splendor of living Nature. They feel that they themselves are a part of the natural world, not that it is a foreign environment they visit on rare occasion.

The National Socialist lifestyle includes the love of animals, and kindness towards them. Nothing is so foreign to the Aryan spirit than the sadistic slaughter of animals for food practiced by the Semitic peoples.

A true National Socialist interacts with the non-Aryans he encounters in his daily life in a courteous manner, to the degree that they treat him the same. Whatever hostility that we may feel towards other peoples is not personal, and it should not be taken out on random non-Whites whom we may encounter. The depiction of National Socialists as being rude, mean or insulting to ordinary non-Whites, who have done nothing offensive, is right out of the Jewish playbook. Despite what our enemies may say about us, the National Socialist is not a mindless thug.

It is not always easy to live an NS lifestyle in today’s world. Certainly, it is easier in all-White rural areas than it is in the soulless racial cesspools which our cities have become.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler found himself in a situation similar to that which we encounter today while living in Vienna. Still a teenager or a young man, he was confronted with degeneracy on all sides. His friend August Kubizek reports how the young Hitler dealt with it:

In the midst of that corrupt city, my friend surrounded himself with a wall of unshakeable principles which enabled him to build up an inner freedom, in spite of the dangers around him. He was afraid of infection, as he often said. Now I understand that he meant, not only venereal infection, but a more general infection, namely, the danger of being caught up in the prevailing conditions and finally being dragged down into a vortex of corruption. It is not surprising that no one understood him, that they took him for an eccentric, and that those few who came in contact with him called him presumptuous and arrogant.

But he went his way, untouched by what went on around him…

Sound familiar?

Ultimately, a National Socialist must live a National Socialist lifestyle. To do otherwise would mean being false to whom he or she is. So even when it is difficult—indeed, even dangerous—he lives his outer life in accordance with his inner being. Yet whatever the cost, he has the great recompense of living his on his own terms. Even in the midst of racial decay and social decline, he lives in the New Order.

________________

About the author: Martin Kerr is the Chief of Staff of the NEW ORDER, the North American affiliate of the World Union of National Socialists.

Categories
August Kubizek Metaphysics of race / sex Poetry Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 67

If we now ask ourselves what influence, apart from that of Wagner’s music and the less immediate but still living influence of the Swastika, could have helped the young Adolf to acquire so early the power to transcend space and time in this way, we are immediately led to think of his only childhood love: the beautiful Stephanie, with her heavy blond braids wrapped around her head like a soft, shiny crown[1]; Stephanie to whom he never dared to speak because he had ‘not been introduced to her’ [2] but who had become in his eyes ‘the female counterpart of his own person’.[3]

August Kubizek insists on the exclusivity of this very special love: the ‘ideal’ plane on which he always remained. He tells us that the young Adolf, who identified Stephanie with the Elsa of Lohengrin and ‘other heroine figures of the Wagnerian repertoire’[4] didn’t feel the slightest need to talk or hear her, as he was sure that ‘intuition was enough for the mutual understanding of people out of the ordinary’. He was satisfied to watch her pass by from afar; to love her from afar as a vision from another world.

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Editor’s note: Is the image I chose for the front cover of The Fair Race finally understood (a girl I met decades ago, and who I talk about in my last book)?
 

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Once, however, on a beautiful Sunday in June, something unforgettable happened. He saw her, as always, at his mother’s side, in a parade of flower floats. She was holding a bouquet of poppies, cornflowers and daisies: the same flowers under which her float disappeared. She was approaching. He had never looked at her so closely, and she had never seemed more beautiful. He was, says Kubizek, ‘delighted with the earth’. [5]
 

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Editor’s note: From the pen of Spanish Romanticist poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870):

Hoy la tierra y los cielos me sonríen,
Hoy llega al fondo de mi alma el sol,
Hoy la he visto…, la he visto y me ha mirado,
¡Hoy creo en Dios!

Terry Rooney’s translation:

Today heaven and earth smile upon me
Today the sun reaches the depths of my soul
Today I saw her… I saw her and she looked at me,
Today I believe in God!
 

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Then the girl’s bright eyes rested on him for a moment. She smiled carelessly at him in the festive atmosphere of that sunny Sunday, took a flower from her bouquet and tossed it to him.[6] And the witness to this scene adds that ‘never again’—not even when he saw him again in 1940, in the aftermath of the French campaign, at the height of his glory—did he see Adolf Hitler ‘happier’.

But even then, the future Führer did nothing to get closer to Stephanie. His Platonic love remained like that, ‘weeks, months, years’. Not only did he no longer expect anything from the girl after the gesture I have just recalled, but ‘any initiative she might have taken beyond the rigid framework of convention would have destroyed the image he had of her in his heart’.[7]

When one remembers what role the ‘Lady of his thoughts’ played in the life and spiritual development of the medieval knight—who could also be, though not necessarily, a figure we just caught a glimpse of, even some distant princess, whose beauty and virtues the devoted knight knew only by hearsay—and when we know, moreover, what deep links existed between the Orders of Chivalry and hermetic teaching, that is to say initiatory—one cannot help but connect the dots.

August Kubizek assures us that, at least during the years he lived in Vienna with him, the future Führer didn’t once respond to the solicitations of women, didn’t associate with any of them, didn’t approach any of them although he was ‘bodily and sexually quite normal’.[8] And he tells us that the beloved image of the woman who, in his eyes, ‘embodied the ideal German woman’ would have supported him in this deliberate refusal of any carnal adventure.

It is instructive to note the reason for this refusal, which Kubizek reports in all simplicity misunderstanding the implications of his childhood friend’s words. Adolf Hitler wanted, he tells us, to keep within himself, ‘pure and undiminished’ [9] what he called ‘the flame of Life’, in other words, the vital force. ‘A single moment of inattention, and this sacred flame is extinguished for ever’—at least for a long time—he wrote, showing us the value the future Führer attached to it. He tries, unsuccessfully, to elucidate what it is. He sees in it only the symbol of the ‘holy love’ that awakens between people who have kept themselves pure in body and spirit, and who ‘is worthy of a union destined to give the people a healthy offspring.’ [10] The preservation of this ‘flame’ was to be, he wrote, ‘the most important task’[11] of that ‘ideal state’ which the future founder of the Third German Reich thought of in his lonely hours.

This is undoubtedly true. But there is more to it than that.

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[1] The name Stephanie evokes the idea of a crown (Stephanos, in Greek).
[2] Kubizek, p. 88.
[3] Ibid. (‘die weibliche Entsprechung der eigenen Person’).
[4] Ibid., page 78.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., page 84.
[7] Ibid., page 87.
[8] Ibid., page 276.
[9] page 280.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.

Categories
3-eyed crow August Kubizek Catholic religious orders Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Swastika

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 66

It is curious, to say the least, that this extraordinary episode—which, apart from its own ‘resonance’ of truth, is guaranteed by Kubizek’s ignorance of the superhuman realm—has not, to my knowledge, been commented on by any of those who have tried to link National Socialism to ‘occult’ sources. Even the authors who have—quite wrongly!—wanted to attribute to the Führer a nature of ‘medium’ have not, as far as I know, attempted to use it. Instead, they have insisted on the immense power of suggestion which he exercised not only over crowds (and women), but on all those who came, even if only occasionally, into contact with him; on men as coldly detached as a Himmler; on soldiers as realistic as an Otto Skorzeny, a Hans-Ulrich Rudel or a Degrelle.

Now, it is ignorance of the first elements of the science of para-psychic phenomena to consider as ‘medium’ one who enjoys such power. A medium is the one who receives, who undergoes suggestion; not the one who is capable of inflicting it on others, and especially many others. This power is the privilege of the hypnotist or magnetizer, and in this case of a magnetizer of a stature that borders on the superhuman; of a magnetizer capable for his benefit—or rather for the idea, of which he wants to be the promoter—to play the role of a ‘medium’ to the strongest, the stalest, the most resistant to any affecting.

One is not both a magnetiser and a medium. We are one or the other, or neither. And if we want to include some ‘para-psychic’ in the history of Adolf Hitler’s political career—as I believe we are entitled to do—then the magnetizer is him, whose power of exalting and transforming human beings, by the mere spoken word, is comparable to that which Orpheus exerted, it is said, by the enchantment of his lyre, on people and beasts. The ‘medium’ is the German people, almost all of them—and some non-Germans throughout the world, to whom the radio transmitted the bewitching Voice.

The episode mentioned above, of which I have translated Augustus Kubizek’s account, [1] could very well serve as an argument in favour of the presence of ‘medium gifts’ in the young Adolf Hitler if these so-called gifts weren’t contradicted resoundingly, precisely by the astonishing power of suggestion which he didn’t cease to exercise throughout his career on the multitudes and practically all the people. Indeed, Kubizek tells us that he had the distinct impression that ‘another I’ had spoken through his friend; that the stream of prophetic eloquence had seemed to flow from him as from a force alien to him. Now, if the adolescent speaker had nothing of the ‘medium’ about him; if he was in no way possessed by ‘an Other’—god or the devil, whatever; in any case not himself—what then was this ‘other I’ who seemed to take his place during that unforgettable hour on the summit of the Freienberg, under the stars, and to substitute him so completely that the friend would have had some difficulty in recognising him, hadn’t he continued to see him?

Understandably, Auguste Kubizek didn’t ‘dare to pass judgment’ on this. However, he speaks of an ‘ecstatic state’, of ‘complete rapture’ (völlige Entrückung) and the transposition of the visionary’s experience onto ‘another plane, tailored to him’ (auf eine andere, ihm gemässe Ebene). Moreover, this recent living experience—the impression made on him by the story of the 14th-century Roman tribune translated and interpreted by Wagner’s music—had been, the witness tells us, only the ‘external impulse’ which had led him to the vision of the personal as well as the national future; in other words, which had served as the occasion for the adolescent’s access to a new consciousness: a consciousness in which space and time, and the individual state that is linked to these limitations, are transcended.

This would mean that the ‘other plane to the measure’ of the young Adolf Hitler was nothing less than that of the ‘eternal present’ and that, far from having been ‘possessed’ by an alien entity, the future master of the multitudes had become master of the Centre of his being; that he had, under the mysterious influence of his initiator—Wagner—taken the great decisive step on the path of esoteric knowledge, undergone the first irreversible mutation—the opening of the ‘third eye’ which had made him an ‘Edenic man’.

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Editor’s Note: Are you finally beginning to understand the metaphor that I have used so many times on this site (the symbol of the three-eyed raven)?
 

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He had just acquired the degree of being corresponding to what is called, in initiatory language, the Little Mysteries. And the ‘other I’ which had spoken through his mouth of things that his daily conscious self was still unaware of, or perhaps only half-perceived ‘as if through a veil’, a few hours before, was his true ‘I’ and that of all the living: the Being, with whom he had just realized his identification.

It may seem strange to the vast majority of my readers—including those who still venerate him as ‘our Führer forever’—that he could, at such an astonishingly young age, have shown such an awakening to supra-sensible realities. Among the men who aspire with all their ardour to essential knowledge, how many are there, in fact, who grow old in meditation and pious exercises without yet reaching this level? But if there is one area where the most fundamental inequality and the most blatant appearance of ‘arbitrariness’ reigns, it is this.

God places his august sign on the forehead of whoever pleases him;
He has forsaken the eagle, and chosen the birdie,
Said the monk. Why did he do this? Who shall tell? Nobody![2]

There is no impossibility for an exceptional adolescent to cross the barrier opened to the mind in search of principled truth, initiation into the Little Mysteries. According to what is still told in India about his life, the great Sankaracharya was one of these. And twenty-two centuries earlier, Akhnaton, king of Egypt, was also sixteen years old when he began to preach the cult of Aten, Essence of the Sun, of which the ‘Disc’ is only the visible symbol. And everything leads us to believe that there were others, less and less rare as we go back for the cycle in which we live the last centuries.

If, on the other hand, one sees in Adolf Hitler one of the figures—and undoubtedly the penultimate one—of the One who returns when all seems lost; the most recent of the many precursors of the supreme divine incarnation or of the last messenger of the Eternal (the Mahdi of the Mahometans; the Christ returned in glory of the Christians; the Maitreya of the Buddhists; the Saoshyant of the Mazdeans; the Kalki of the Hindus) or by whatever name one wishes to call him, who is to end this cycle and usher in the Golden Age of the next, then all becomes clear.

For then, naturally, he was an adolescent and before that, already an exceptional child: a child whose sign, a word, a nothing (or what might seem ‘a nothing’ to anyone else) was enough to awaken his intellectual intuition. So, it is not impossible to think that, from the school years 1896-97, 1897-98 (and partly 1898-99), which he spent as a pupil at the Benedictine abbey of Lambach-an-Traun, in Upper Austria, the magic of the Holy Swastika—a powerful cosmic symbol, an immemorial evocator of the principal truth—seized him, penetrated him, dominated him; that he had, beyond the exhilarating solemnity of Catholic worship, identified with it forever.

For the Reverend Father Theodorich Hagen, Abbot of Lambach, had, thirty years earlier, this sacred sign engraved on the walls, on the woodwork, in every corner of the monastery, however paradoxical such an action may seem ‘without counterpart in a Christian convent’.[3] And as he sang in the choir the young Adolf, nine years old in 1898, ten years old in 1899, had ‘right in front of him’ on ‘the high back of the abbot’s chair’, in the very centre of Father Hagen’s heraldic shield, the ancient Symbol now destined to remain forever attached to his name.

It is natural, then, that he should have been aware very early on, in parallel with his opening up to the world of Essences, of what had to be done in this visible and tangible world, at the eleventh hour, a ‘recovery’; or even only to suggest one—to sound the last, supreme warning of the Gods, in case the universal decadence was irredeemable (as indeed it seems to be). And, as Kubizek reports, there is every reason to believe that this was the case, since even at the time of his extraordinary awakening the future Führer spoke of the ‘mission’ (Auftrag) he was to receive one day, to lead the people ‘from bondage to the heights of freedom’.[4]

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[1] There is a French edition of Auguste Kubizek’s book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, published by Gallimard. Unfortunately, the original text has been shortened. The most interesting passages of this story are not included in the translation.

[2] Leconte de Lisle in the poem entitled ‘Hieronymus’, in Poèmes tragiques.

[3] Brissaud : Hitler et l’Ordre Noir, page 23.

[4] Kubizek: Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, page 140.

Categories
August Kubizek Richard Wagner Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 65

Despite the polemics that the name of the Führer still unleashes, more than a quarter of a century after the disappearance of his physical person, his initiation into a powerful esoteric group, in direct connection with the primordial Tradition, is no longer in doubt.

Certainly, his detractors—and there are many!—have tried to present him as a man driven to all kinds of excesses, having been driven by his ‘hubris’ to betray the spirit of his spiritual masters. Or they saw in him a master of error, a disciple of ‘black magicians’, himself the soul and instrument of subversion (in the metaphysical sense) at its most tragic. But their clarity is suspect only because they all take the ‘moral’ point of view—and a false morality, since it is supposedly ‘the same for all men’.

What repels them, and prevents them a priori from recognising the truth of Hitlerism, is the total absence of anthropocentrism, and the enormity of the ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’, to which he is historically linked. In other words, they reproach him with being at odds with ‘universal consciousness’.
 

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Editor’s note: What Aryans don’t understand is that one has to reject theism and embrace pantheism to save one’s race (see my last comment in another thread).
 

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But the all-too-famous ‘universal conscience’ doesn’t exist; it has never existed. It is, at most, only the set of prejudices common to people of the same civilisation, insofar as they don’t feel or think for themselves, which means that it is not ‘universal’ in any way. Furthermore, spiritual development is not a matter of morality but of knowledge; of direct insight into the eternal Laws of being and non-being.

It is written in those ancient Laws of Manu, whose spirit is so close to that of the most enlightened followers of the Führer, that ‘a Brahmin possessing the entire Rig Veda’ (which doesn’t mean knowing by heart the 1009 hymns which compose it but the supreme knowledge), the initiation (which would imply the perfect understanding of the symbols hidden therein under the words and images they evoke) it is written, I say, that such a Brahman ‘would be stained with no crime, even if he had slain all the inhabitants of the three worlds, and accepted food from the vilest man’.[1]

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: This reminds me of ‘Dies irae’, the first essay in my Day of Wrath. The error of Christians and secular neochristians—virtually all whites—is that they think through New Testament value codes; not like the Star-Child.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Certainly, such a man, having transcended all individuality, could only act dispassionately and, like the sage spoken of in the Bhagawad-Gîta, ‘in the interest of the universe’. But it doesn’t follow that his action would correspond to a ‘man-centred’ morality. There is even reason to believe that it could, if need be, deviate from this. For nothing proves that the ‘interest of the Universe’—the agreement of the action with the deep requirements of a moment of history, which the initiate grasps from the angle of the ‘eternal Present’— sometimes doesn’t require the sacrifice of millions of men, even the best.

Much has been made of Adolf Hitler’s membership (as well as that of several very influential figures of the Third Reich, including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart) in the mysterious society founded in 1912 by Rudolf von Sebottendorf. Much has also been said about the decisive influence on him of readings of a very particular esoteric and messianic character, among others the writings of the former Cistercian monk Adolf Josef Lanz, known as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, founder (in 1900) and Grand Master of the ‘Order of the New Temple’, and his journal, Ostara (founded in 1905). We did not fail to recall his close connection with the geopolitician Karl Haushofer, member of the Société du Vril, versed in the knowledge of secret doctrines, which would have been revealed to him in India, Tibet and Japan, and very aware of the immense ‘magic power’ of the Swastika.[2]

Finally, the particular role of initiator played by at least Dietrich Eckart—if not Eckart and Rudolf Hess, although both have always presented themselves in public life as his faithful disciples and collaborators—has been emphasized. Eckart is said to have declared, in December 1923, on his deathbed, before some of his brothers of the Thule Society, that the masters of the said Society, including himself, would have given Adolf Hitler ‘the means of communicating with them’, that is, with the ‘higher unknowns’ or ‘intelligences outside of humanity’, and that he, in particular, would have ‘influenced history more than any other German’.[3]

It should not be forgotten that, whatever the initiatory training he underwent later on, it seems certain that the future Führer was already ‘between the ages of twelve and fourteen’ and perhaps even earlier, in possession of the fundamental directives of his historical ‘self’; that he had already shown his love for art in general, and especially for architecture and music; that he had already shown interest in German history (and history in general); that he was an ardent patriot; that he was hostile to the Jews (whom he felt to be the absolute antithesis of the Germans); and finally, his boundless admiration for all of Richard Wagner’s work.

It seems certain, from the account of his life up to the age of nineteen given by his teenage friend August Kubizek, that his great, true ‘initiator’—the one who really awakened in him a more than a human vision of things before any affiliation with any esoteric teaching group—was Wagner, and Wagner alone. Adolf Hitler retained all his life the enthusiastic veneration he had, barely out of childhood, devoted to the Master of Bayreuth. No one has ever understood or felt the cosmic significance of Wagnerian themes as he did—no one, not even Nietzsche who had undoubtedly gone some way towards knowing the First Principles. The creation of Parsifal remained an enigma for the philosopher of the ‘superman’, who only grasped the Christian envelope. The Führer, on the other hand, knew how to rise above the apparent opposition of opposites—including that which seems to exist between the ‘Good Friday Enchantment’ and the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. He saw further ahead.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: We’ve talked a lot about Parsifal on this site, and I’ve also read what Nietzsche says about that opera (he loved the Prelude). If we take into account what I and others have been saying about Bach’s music, we see that Parsifal was a step forward in that syncretism of the Christian with the Pagan: something that Hitler understood perfectly, although the ultimate goal was pan-Germanic Paganism stripped of Christian influence. The Wagnerian Richard Strauss, who premiered works during the Third Reich, could have continued crossing that bridge but the Allies took it upon themselves to cut off neopagan culture and impose consumer capitalism, or communism, on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

Above I mentioned my ‘Dies irae’. To understand Richard Strauss better, remember what I say there about a symphonic poem I listened to countless times in my bedroom as a teenager: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Strauss’s opus 30.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Behind the ‘poetic setting of Wagnerian drama’, Hitler welcomed ‘the practical teaching of the obstinate struggle for selection and renewal’[4] and in the Grail, the source of eternal life, the very symbol of ‘pure blood’. And he praised the Master for having been able to give his prophetic message both through Parsifal and the pagan form of the Tetralogy. Wagner’s music had the gift of evoking in him the vision not only of previous worlds, but of scenes of history in the making; in other words, of opening the gates of the eternal Present—and this, apparently, from adolescence, if we are to believe the admirable scene reported by Auguste Kubizek which would have taken place following a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi at the Linz Opera House, when the future Führer was sixteen. The scene is too beautiful not to take the liberty of quoting it in full.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Wagner’s opera is about the life of Cola di Rienzi, a papal notary turned political leader, who lived in medieval Italy and succeeded in overthrowing the noble classes in Rome and giving power to the people. Magnanimous at first, he had to quell a revolt by the nobles to regain their privileges. In time, popular opinion changed, and the Church, which at first was in his favour, turned against him. At the end of the opera the people burned the Capitol in which Rienzi and a few followers met their fate.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
On leaving the theatre in Linz, where they had just seen a performance of Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, the two young men, Adolf and Augustus, instead of going home took, even though it was already past midnight, ‘the path leading to the top of the Freienberg’. They liked this deserted place because they had spent many a beautiful Sunday afternoon there alone in the middle of nature.

Now it was young Adolf who, visibly upset after the show, had insisted that they return there, despite the late hour or perhaps because of it. ‘He (Adolf) walked on’, writes Augustus, ‘without saying a word, without taking my presence into account. I had never seen him so strange, so pale. The higher we climbed, the more the fog dissipated…’

I wanted to ask my friend where he wanted to go like that, but the fierce and closed expression on his face prevented me from asking him the question… When we reached the top, the fog in which the city was still immersed disappeared. Above our heads the stars were shining brightly in a perfectly clear sky. Adolf then turned to me and took both my hands and clasped them tightly between his own. It was a gesture I had never seen him do before. I could feel how moved he was. His eyes shone with animation. The words did not come out of his mouth with ease, as usual, but in a choppy way. His voice was hoarse, and betrayed his upset.

Gradually he began to speak more freely. Words poured out of his mouth. Never before had I heard him speak, and never again was I to hear him speak as he did when alone, standing under the stars, we seemed to be the only creatures on earth. It is impossible for me to relate in detail the words my friend spoke in that hour before me.

Something quite remarkable, which I had never noticed when he had previously spoken struck me then: it was as if another ‘I’ was speaking through him: an Other, in contact with whom he was himself as upset as I was. It was impossible to believe that he was a speaker who was intoxicated by his own words. Quite the contrary! I rather had the impression that he himself experienced with astonishment, I would even say with bewilderment, what was flowing out of him with the elemental violence of a force of nature.

I dare not pass judgment on this observation. But it was a state of rapture in which he transposed into a grandiose vision, on another plane, his own—without direct reference to this example and model, and not merely as a repetition of this experience—what he had just experienced in connection with Rienzi. The impression made on him by this opera had, rather, been the external impulse that had compelled him to speak. Like the mass of water, hitherto held back by a dam, rushes forward, irresistible, if the dam is broken, so the torrent of eloquence poured out of him, in sublime images, with an invincible power of suggestion, he unfolded before me his own future and that of the German people…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: For decades I have called this phenomenon ‘the language of the Self’. (Alas, in Neanderthal land where I live, I never had a chance to use it on a mortal; only in my soliloquies.)

______ 卐 ______

 
Then there was silence. We went back down to the city. The clocks in the church towers struck three in the morning. We parted in front of my parents’ house. Adolf shook my hand. Stunned, I saw that he was not going home but back up the hill. ‘Where do you want to go again?’, I asked him, puzzled. He answered laconically: ‘I want to be alone’. I followed him for a long time with my eyes, while he went up the empty street in the night, wrapped in his dark coat.[5]

‘And’, Kubizek adds, ‘many years were to pass before I understood what that hour under the stars, during which he had been lifted above all earthly things, had meant for my friend’. And he reports a little later on the very words that Adolf Hitler pronounced, much later, after having recounted to Frau Wagner the scene that I have just recalled, unforgettable words: ‘It was then that everything began’. That was when the future master of Germany was, I repeat, sixteen years old.

_________

[1] Laws of Manu, Book Eleven, verse 261.

[2] Brissaud: Hitler et l’Ordre Noir (op. cit.), page 53.

[3] Ibid., pages 61-62.

[4] Rauschning: Hitler m’a dit (op. cit.), page 257.

[5] Auguste Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, 1953 edition, pages 139-141.

Categories
August Kubizek Kali Yuga Philosophy of history Salvador Borrego Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 51

The Tischgespräche, the Führer’s table talks with a few senior party officials, senior SS officers or foreign guests[1], are instructive in this respect. Even more instructive, perhaps, are certain reports that are hostile to Hitlerism, all the more virulent because their authors are angrier at having initially followed Adolf Hitler in the wrong direction, and at having felt themselves to be fools in retrospect—wrongly, no doubt, for it must have been very difficult to grasp the true thinking of the Master before being part of the narrow circle of people who enjoyed his confidence.

Such is, for example, the book by the former President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Told Me which had, in its time, some notoriety since in 1939 the thirteenth French edition of it was already published: an excellent book, despite of the aggressiveness that pierces every line. The fact that Rauschning himself seems to be completely unaware of the cyclical conception of history and, in general, of the supra-human truths which are the basis of all ancient wisdom, makes the judgements he believes he is making against the Führer all the more eloquent by accusing him (without knowing it) of waging his struggle precisely in the name of these truths. Finally, nothing can shed light on certain aspects of Hitlerism like Hans Grimm’s book Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, a work by an impartial non-Hitlerite, or the account given by Auguste Kubizek, a man with no political allegiance whatsoever, of his years of friendship with the future Führer, then aged between fifteen and nineteen, in his book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund.[2]

The first thing that strikes one on reading these various texts is Adolf Hitler’s awareness of the speed with which everything is falling apart in our time, and of the total reversal of values that the slightest recovery would mean. It is also the very clear feeling he seems to have had that his action represented the last chance of the Aryan race as well as the last (at least theoretical) possibility of recovery, before the end of the present cycle.

This sentiment was coupled with the conviction that he himself was not ‘the last’ fighter against the forces of disintegration; not the One who would usher in the glorious ‘Golden Age’ of the next cycle. Five years before the seizure of power, the Führer said in all simplicity to Hans Grimm: ‘I know that someone must appear, and face our situation. I have been looking for this man. I have not been able to find him anywhere, and that is why I have arisen, to carry out the preparatory task, only the urgent preparatory task, for I know that I am not the One who is to come. And I also know what I lack. But the Other remains absent, and no one is there, and there is no more time to waste’.[3]

There is even reason to believe that he sensed—if not knew; I will come back to this point—the inevitability of disaster and the need for him to sacrifice himself. But just as his vision was centred on the German people but went far beyond Germany, so his defeat was to be a catastrophe on a planetary scale (which it was, indeed) and his sacrifice was to take on an unsuspected significance.
 

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Note of the Editor: In 1955 the notable Mexican José Vasconcelos (see my 2011 article: here) wrote a preface for Salvador Borrego’s main work, Derrota Mundial [World Defeat], in which Borrego argues that the world lost with the defeat of Germany. In 2015, on Borrego’s 100th birthday, David Duke, Ernst Zündel and Mark Weber visited him in Mexico. The four of them can be seen in this photograph; Weber appears to the far left; Zündel in the middle.
 

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He told Hermann Rauschning: ‘If we fail to win, we will drag half the world down with us, and no one will be able to rejoice in a victory over Germany’ and: ‘He could not otherwise accomplish his mission’, notes this author, without apparently realising the significance of such an assertion.[4]

So what was this ‘mission’, so imperious although He who knew he was in charge of it could, at times, foresee its failure? It was that of all those beings, both human and more than human—in India they are called avatars or descents of the divine Spirit in the visible and tangible world—who, from age to age, have fought against the tide of Time, for the restoration of a material order in the image of the eternal Order: that of the God Krishna, that of the Prophet Mohammed, and, in Germanic legend, truer than history: that of the hero Siegfried, like them both initiate and warrior.

Such a mission always implies the destruction of the decadent world, without which the restoration of a hierarchical society according to eternal values would be unthinkable. It therefore implies the recognition of the reign of evil, of the ‘triumph of injustice’[5] that is, what is contrary to the divine Order, at the time of the combatant—and the exaltation of combat. Undoubtedly, people who militate by violence against an already bad established order, in favour of a ‘new world’ even worse from the viewpoint of natural hierarchies, are also dissatisfied people who aren’t afraid of armed struggle. But, as I have tried to show above, it is the nature of their dream, not the methods employed for its realisation, which places them exactly opposite the fighters against time.

There are reckless, irresponsible fighters—both in the direction of temporal evolution and against it. There are millions of people of ‘goodwill’—liberals, individualists, pacifists, ‘friends of man’ of all stripes—who, mostly through sheer ignorance or laziness of mind, follow the deceptive suggestions of the agents of the Dark Forces, and contribute, with the most generous intentions in the world, to accelerating the pace of universal degeneration.

There are also people perfectly unconscious of the eternal laws of the visible as well as the subtle Universe, who militate enthusiastically for selection in battle, for the segregation of races, and, in general, for an aristocratic conception of the world, by instinct—simply out of horror of the physical and moral ugliness of men, and out of hatred of the prejudices and institutions which encourage its generalisation. Many of us are among them. Nobler than the former, since they are centred on beauty which, in its essence, merges with Truth, they are, despite everything, just as unresponsible in the strong sense of the word, because they are just as attached to the realm of impression, that is to say, to the subjective.

But it is different with leaders… all the more so with the founders of new times.

The real initiator of a subversive movement in the sense I have given above, can only be a man in possession of some degree of undeniable knowledge. But he uses it in reverse: for purposes contrary to the spirit of true hierarchies, therefore contrary to those which a wise man’s action should take. On the other hand, the founder and leader of a faith ‘against Time’—as Adolf Hitler was—can only be one of those men whom I have, in another book,[6] called ‘above Time’: a sage, an initiate in union with the Divine and simultaneously a warrior—and perhaps also a ‘politician’—ready to employ, at the level of the contingencies of the visible world, all the means he knows to be effective, and judging a means only by its effectiveness.

He can only be a man both above Time, as regards his being, and against Time, as regards his action in the world; in other words, a warrior (or a politician, or both) fighting against the order, institutions and powers of his time, with whatever weapons he can muster, with a view to an (at least temporary) ‘recovery’ of society, inspired by a Golden Age ideal: a will to bring the ‘new’ order into accord with the Eternal Order.

Now, I repeat: the texts, the facts, the whole history and atmosphere of National Socialism become fully comprehensible only if, once and for all, one admits that Adolf Hitler was such a man: the most recent manifestation, among us, of the One who returns from age to age ‘for the protection of the righteous, for the destruction of those who do evil, for the firm establishment of the order according to the nature of things’.[7]

_________

[1] Translated into French under the title Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, by R. d’Harcourt.

[2] A (shortened) French translation was published by Gallimard.

[3] Hans Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? published by Klosterhaus Verlag, Lippoldsberg, in 1954; page 14.

[4] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, 13th French edition, 1939, pages 142 & 279.

[5] Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verse 7.

[6] The Lightning and the Sun, written from 1948 to 1956, published in Calcutta in 1958.

[7] Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verse 8.

Categories
August Kubizek

A new religion for whites, 5

by Kevin Alfred Strom

This week we continue to explore the idea of a new religion for racially-conscious White people; and we return again to National Socialist Germany. As I said several weeks ago of that nation:

With profounder ideals and a stronger will than any other leadership structure of any other society for thousands of years at least, Germany ultimately sought to spiritually shepherd the unique expression of the Life Force and the growing consciousness that is our race through the dangers of the 20th century and beyond.

Today we go beyond the spiritual awakenings that took place there, and look with muted awe at the tragic apparent end of National Socialist Germany and the death—and undying spirit—of National Socialism’s founder, Adolf Hitler. Was his life and death the beginning of a new religious tradition?

From the life of Siddhartha Gautama to the beginnings of modern organized Buddhism, centuries passed. Three hundred years elapsed between the first stories of Jesus and the founding of Christianity. From the Mycenaean origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries to the Greek celebration of them there passed nearly a thousand years. Adolf Hitler died just eleven years before I was born. We are just at the beginning.

 

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The Death and Undying Spirit of Adolf Hitler

by Savitri Devi

Others have described—or tried to describe—far better than I (who was not on the spot) ever could, the last days of the Third German Reich: the irresistible advance of the two frantic invading armies (and of their respective auxiliaries) into the heart of the land, in which years of unheard-of bombardment had left nothing but ruins; the terror of the last and fiercest air raids that disorganized everything, while streams and streams of refugees kept pouring westward (realizing that they had, in spite of all, less to fear from the Americans—enemies of National Socialism with no faith to put in its place—than from the Russians, who were fighting in full awareness of their allegiance to the contrary faith); the horror of the last desperate battles, intended to immobilize for a while an enemy that one now knew to be the winner; and the moral breakdown—the frightening, blank hopelessness, the bitter feeling of having been mocked and cheated—of millions in whose hearts faith in National Socialism had been inseparable from the certitude of Germany’s invincibility: the moral ruins, even more tragic and more lasting than the material ones.

Others have described or tried to describe the horror of the last days of Berlin under the relentless fire of the Russian guns—Berlin which, seen from above, “looked like the crater of an immense volcano.” (These are the words of the well-known German airwoman, Hanna Reitsch, who saw it.) In the midst of the capital ablaze, stood the broad and yet untouched gardens of the Chancellery of the Reich. There, surrounded by a few of his faithful ones in his bunker, underground, Adolf Hitler, the man against time, lived the apparent end of all his life’s work and of all his dreams, and the beginning of his people’s long martyrdom. More or less accurate reports have reached the outer world about his last known gestures and words. But nobody has described in all its more-than-human grandeur the last, real, inner phase—the tragic failure, and yet (considered from a standpoint exceeding by far that of the politician) the culmination—of his dedicated life.

In August Kubizek’s biography of him as a young man, there is a passage too significant for me not to quote it nearly in extenso. It is the description of a walk to the Freienberg (a hill overlooking Linz) in the middle of the night, just after the future Führer and his friend had attended together, at the opera, a performance of Richard Wagner’s Rienzi. “We were alone,” writes Kubizek. “The town had sunk below us into the fog. As though he were moved by an invisible force, Adolf Hitler climbed to the top of the Freienberg. I now realized that we no longer stood in solitude and darkness, for above us shone the stars.

“Adolf stood before me. He took both my hands in his and held them tight—a gesture that he had never yet made. I could feel from the pressure of his hands how moved he was. His eyes sparkled feverishly. The words did not pour from his lips with their usual easiness, but burst forth harsh and passionate. I noticed by his voice even more than by the way in which he held my hands how the episode he had lived (the performance of Rienzi) had shattered him to the depths.

“Gradually, he began to speak more freely. The words came with more speed. Never before and also never since have I heard Adolf Hitler speak like he did then, as we stood alone under the stars as though we had been the only two creatures on earth.

“It is impossible for me to repeat the words my friend uttered in that hour.

“Something quite remarkable, which I had not noticed before, even when he spoke to me with vehemence, struck me at that moment: It was as though another self spoke through him; another self, from the presence of which he was as moved as I was. In no way could one have said of him (as it sometimes happens, in the case of brilliant speakers) that he was intoxicated with his own words. On the contrary! I had the feeling that he experienced with amazement, I would say, that he was himself possessed by that which burst out of him with elemental power. I do not allow myself a comment on that observation. But it was a state of ecstasy, a state of complete trance, in which, without mentioning it or the instance involved in it, he projected his experience of the Rienzi performance into a glorious vision upon another plane, congenial to himself. More so: The impression he had received from that performance was merely the external Impulse that had prompted him to speak. Like a flood breaks through a dam which has burst, so rushed the words from his mouth. In sublime, irresistible images, he unfolded before me his own future and that of our people.

“Till then I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or an architect. In that hour there was no question of such a thing. He was concerned with something higher, which I could not yet understand . . . He now spoke of a mission that he was one day to receive from our people, in order to guide them out of slavery, to the heights of freedom . . . Many years were to pass before I could realize what that starry hour, separated from all earthly things, had meant to my friend.”

Calmer now, amid the thunder of explosions and the noise of crumbling buildings—the flames and ruins of the Second World War—than then, at the top of the Freienberg, under the stars; freed from the temporary wild despair that had seized him at the news of the Russian advance west of the Oder River, Adolf Hitler beheld the future. And that future—his own and that of National Socialism and that of Germany, which had now become, forever, the fortress of the new faith—was nothing less than eternity; the eternity of truth, more unshakable (and more soothing) in its majesty even than that of the Milky Way.

The Russians could come, and their “gallant Allies” from the West could meet them and rejoice with them upon the ashes of the Third Reich (as Winston Churchill and his daughter Sarah, who were actually to be seen a few days later giggling with Russian officers before the skeleton of the Reichstag); Berlin could be wiped out—or bolshevized—and Germany, cut in two or in four, could, for years and years, suffer such an ordeal as no nation in history had yet suffered. In spite of all, National Socialism, the modern expression of cosmic truth, would endure and conquer.

National Socialism would rise again because it is true to cosmic reality and because that which is true does not pass. Germany’s via dolorosa was indeed the way to coming glory. It had to be taken, if the privileged nation was to fulfill her mission absolutely, i.e., if she was to be the nation that died for the sake of the highest human race, which she embodied, and that would rise again to take the lead of those surviving Aryans who are—at last!—to understand her message of life and to carry it with them into the splendor of the dawning Golden Age.

Oh, now—now under the ceaseless fire and thunder of the Russian artillery; now, on the brink of disaster—how the man against time clearly understood this!

Above him and above the smoke of the Russian cannons and of the burning city, above the noise of explosions, millions and millions of miles away, the stars—those same stars that had shed their light over the adolescent’s first prophetic ecstasy forty years before—sparkled in all their glory, in the limitless void. And the man against time, who could not see them, knew that his National Socialist wisdom, founded upon the very laws of life; his wisdom that this doomed world had cursed and rejected, was and would remain, in spite of all, as unassailable and everlasting as their everlasting dance.

Categories
Albert Speer August Kubizek David Irving Heinrich Himmler Monologe im Führerhauptquartier Reinhard Heydrich Third Reich Zweites Buch

What is the best Hitler biography?

by Andrew Hamilton




I’m not a National
Socialist, but…
I have read a few
books on Hitler.

Regarding Hitler,
I agree with
Irmin Vinson:



I consider Hitler less a model to be followed than an avalanche of propaganda we must dig ourselves out from under. Never in human history has a single man received such sustained vilification, the basic effect and purpose of which has been to inhibit Whites from thinking racially and from acting in their own racial self-interest, as all other racial/ethnic groups do. Learning the truth about Hitler is a liberating experience. By the truth I mean not an idealized counter-myth to the pervasive myth of Hitler as evil incarnate, but the man himself, faults and virtues, strengths and weaknesses. (“Some Thoughts on Hitler”)

Since literally thousands of worthless books have been churned out about Der Boss, how does one sift through the massive pile of crap on the hopeful assumption that, “Hey, with all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”?

A “good” biography by my definition is an objective, truthful account, not a comic book fabrication about a lunatic, one-testicled rug chewer, or a thinly-disguised religious fable in which Hitler (= Satan/Nazis/Germans/white people) crucifies 6 million Jews (= God’s chosen people, elbowing the Lord Jesus Christ aside) by fantastic and diabolical means before efficiently employing the grisly remains to manufacture bars of soap and lampshades for the amusement of Hitler and his henchmen, or to lighten the burden of wartime rationing.

Hopefully, the book would be well-written and fun to read, as well.

If there’s a reliable bibliographical essay along these lines, I am unaware of it.


Ian Kershaw’s biography

What brought this perennial question—What is the best Hitler biography?—to mind recently was an article about English historian Sir Ian Kershaw in the Guardian (UK) newspaper asserting that the author’s two-volume, 2,000-page (prolixity is the norm in Hitler studies) biography of Hitler published to wide acclaim a decade ago, “is likely to remain the standard life for a generation.”

The biography is: Volume 1, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: 1998), and Volume 2, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: 2000). A single-volume abridgement, Hitler: A Biography, appeared in 2008.

This pattern of two-volume books and abridgements, plus multiple translations, editions and printings of the same book at different times, often with different titles, continually bedevils the researcher.

Kershaw, who comes from a white, working-class background, does not inspire confidence. Among other things, he’s a knight (OBE), though he claims to be “embarrassed” by the “neo-feudal title.”

During the so-called Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) in Germany from 1986 to 1989, Kershaw teamed with academic mentor Martin Broszat, an anti-German German, to publicly attack other German historians—Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand—as apologists for the German past.


“Comic Book” Titles as a Screen

One heuristic I use is to reject any book with a ridiculous or patently propagandistic title.

Using that guideline, the New York Times did Kershaw no favor when it titled its shallow reviews of his two Hitler volumes “The Devil’s Miracle Man” and “When Depravity Was Contagious,” respectively.

Examples of other self-destructive titles are The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977; 1993), Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (1998), Adolf Hitler: A Chilling Tale of Propaganda as Packaged by Joseph Goebbels. (1999), Adolf Hitler: A Study in Hate (2001), and Hitler and the Nazi Leaders: A Unique Insight into Evil (2001).


Books I own

I read Konrad Heiden’s critical Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944) in high school. Its first chapter, “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,” was my introduction to Alfred Rosenberg. I remember being enthralled by the book. Heiden was at least half-Jewish (his mother). He eventually fled Germany and settled in the United States, where he died in 1966. In Hitler’s War David Irving warns against reliance upon Heiden’s and several other biographies “hitherto accepted as ‘standard’ sources on Hitler” without further elaboration.

Another book I read while young is journalist William Shirer’s 1,245-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960). It sold more than 2 million copies and won the National Book Award. I read the whole thing, but with nothing like the zest I read Der Fuehrer. Unfortunately, Shirer’s work is empirically and ideologically flawed.

Robert Payne, author of The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), was a freelance writer, not an academic or journalist. He was enormously prolific. I looked him up in Contemporary Authors and learned that he authored over 110 novels, biographies, and histories. If he began at age 20, he wrote (and published) more than two books per year until he died at age 72. Evidently his pace exacted a price on accuracy. Besides purveying conventional ideological and racial animus, the biography contains glaring factual errors, some very big indeed.

Two spurious memoirs frequently cited by mainstream historians are Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler (1940) (US title: The Voice of Destruction and Fritz Thyssen’s I Paid Hitler (1943) (neither of which I own), both published by a Hungarian Jew, Churchill confidant, and world federalist named Emery Reves.

Rauschning’s fabricated Conversations with Hitler has been relied upon by William L. Shirer, Robert Payne, Jewish historians Leon Poliakov, Gerhard Weinberg, and Nora Levin, Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) (the first comprehensive biography, Bullock’s Hitler dominated scholarship for years; it also possesses the kind of title that’s a red flag to me; I do not own it), and Joachim C. Fest’s Hitler (Germ. 1973, Eng. trans. 1974), among others. For background on this see Mark Weber, “Rauschning’s Phony Conversations With Hitler: An Update,” Journal of Historical Review (Winter 1985–86), pp. 499 ff.

Nevertheless, as David Irving points out, “Historians are quite incorrigible, and will quote any apparently primary source [memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, etc.] no matter how convincingly its false pedigree is exposed.” When “serious” biographers rely upon works like Rauschning’s, their books should be approached cautiously, if at all.

Fest’s Hitler, the first major biography since Alan Bullock’s in 1952, and the first ever by a German author, became the bestselling book in Germany upon its publication; the next year it was translated into 17 languages. A prominent German journalist, broadcaster, and anti-Nazi, Fest was one of a troika of Establishment editors who re-wrote, or co-wrote, German armaments minister Albert Speer’s famous memoir, Inside the Third Reich (Germ. 1969; Eng. trans. 1970). (Speer was imprisoned at Spandau from 1946 to 1966.) The book, a worldwide bestseller, made a fortune for Speer and earned widespread praise for its disavowal of Hitler. According to David Irving, Speer had a secret agreement with his German publisher, Ullstein Verlag, to pay 25% of all royalties and proceeds to the State of Israel.

About Fest’s Hitler Irving wrote, “Stylistically, Fest’s German was good; but the old legends were trotted out afresh, polished to an impressive gleam of authority.”

As noted above, Fest fought on the conservative side of Germany’s Historian’s Dispute in the 1980s, denying the “singularity” of the Holocaust (which, however, he believed in). His Wikipedia entry provides lengthy quotations that strike a contemporary reader as heretical.

Finally, a friend kindly gave me his copy of Timothy W. Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (2008), which is both interesting and informative.


Recommendations of a dissident: William Pierce’s National Vanguard Books Catalog (December 1988)

I’ve often used this valuable reference over the years. It is essentially an elaborate college syllabus. Subdivisions include “European Prehistory, Archaeology, & Folkways,” “European Legend, Myth, and Religion,” “History of Western Civilization,” “Western Art,” and so on. Its 125 carefully-selected titles provide in-depth knowledge and a comprehensive overview of the white race and Western civilization.

With the exception of Mein Kampf, only three Hitler biographies are included in Pierce’s catalog, none of them standard ones. Two are: Heinz A. Heinz, Germany’s Hitler (London: 1934), and Hans Baur (Hitler’s personal pilot), Hitler at My Side (1986).

The third, Otto Wagener’s Hitler–Memoirs of a Confidant (1985), was written in 1946 when Wagener was a British prisoner. It was not published until many years after his death by the late Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Pierce described the book as “By far the most informative and positive memoir by a confidant of Hitler since August Kubizek’s The Young Hitler I Knew” ([German 1953, English 1955], another memoir NV had previously sold).

A notable feature of Wagener’s memoir is that, according to historian Gordon Craig’s New York Times review, it strongly emphasizes Hitler’s pro-British views and depicts the Führer as “an ‘unwitting prisoner’ of Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, powerless to prevent his true intentions from being distorted by evil associates for their own criminal purposes”—claims by an eyewitness that parallel David Irving’s controversial views.


Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and Zweites Buch (Second Book)

Though not biographies, strictly speaking, I own 1950s-era drugstore paperback copies of Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (1953) and Felix Gilbert, ed. and trans., Hitler Directs His War (1950).

According to David Irving, the transcripts published as Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 are genuine. (Though Irving doesn’t say it, the book he discusses, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, is the same as mine, but with a different title—I warned you it’s complicated!)

I recommend clicking on the preceding link to get a feel for how important it is to understand the provenance and reliability—the evidentiary basis—of even “mainstream” books and texts you might otherwise assume are problem-free. To his credit, Irving is keenly aware of the difficulties posed by mainstream books and official documents housed in archives. They cannot simply be accepted at face value.

I should nevertheless quote the following from Irving’s web page:

The Table Talks’ content is more important in my view than Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and possibly even more than his Zweites Buch (1928). It is unadulterated Hitler. He expatiates on virtually every subject under the sun, while his generals and private staff sit patiently and listen, or pretend to listen, to the monologues.

Along with Sir Nevile Henderson’s gripping 1940 book Failure of a Mission: Berlin, 1937-1939, this was one of the first books that I read, as a twelve year old: Table Talk makes for excellent bedtime reading, as each “meal” occupies only two or three pages of print. My original copy, purloined from my twin brother Nicholas, was seized along with the rest of my research library in May 2002.

He adds: “Ignore the 1945 ‘transcripts’ published by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1950s as Hitler’s Last Testament [The Testament of Adolf Hitler—Ed.]—they are fake.” That book purports to be Martin Bormann’s notes on Hitler’s final bunker conversations.

Mein Kampf was originally published in German in two volumes, the first in 1925 and the second in 1927. English translations combine both volumes into one.

I read Mein Kampf thoroughly in 1988, as my well-marked copy indicates. (The fact that it was ’88 is coincidental!) However, the book did not have an impact on me intellectually or emotionally. I wasn’t a national socialist then (much less a National Socialist) and am not one now. Nor do I view Hitler as a quasi-sacred figure.

Part of the reason for the book’s lack of effect may be due to the particular translation I purchased. In the original German the book was a runaway bestseller and the source of much of Hitler’s private fortune. Even acknowledging the political factors involved, one cannot dismiss the possibility that it reads better in German than in its English translations. The quality of a translation determines how well a book “travels” from one language to another. Both fidelity to the original (accuracy) and transmission of the spirit or feel are necessary. I have experienced translations that capture the originals marvelously, and others where even classic works appear dead on the page.

I bought my copy of Mein Kampf without prior research and ended up purchasing the 1939 Hurst and Blackett translation by James Murphy.

Murphy, a former Irish Catholic priest, was hired by the German government to make the official English translation, but the project was scuttled after a dispute. Murphy continued the translation nevertheless, and it appeared independently in Britain in 1939.

I later learned that many English-speaking National Socialists prefer Ralph Manheim’s 1943 Houghton Mifflin translation (which I have not read). It is possible that Manheim better catches the spirit of Hitler’s original, because he was also the translator of Konrad Heiden’s Der Fuehrer which so enthralled me as a boy.

In his catalog, William Pierce categorized Mein Kampf as “semi-autobiographical,” calling it “a beacon and a guide to every healthy soul in this dark age, to everyone who seeks understanding and light.” He described the differences between the English translations this way:

Manheim translation: Accurate, but marred by anti-Hitler introductions and derogatory footnotes.

Murphy translation: No hostile comments, but the translation is not as faithful to the original text.

After Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote what has become known as the Zweites Buch (Second Book) (1928), an extension and elaboration of his foreign policy aims. It also sets forth his views of the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The book was written to clarify his foreign policy objectives for the German public after the 1928 elections. However, his publisher advised him that, from a sales point of view, the time was not propitious for bringing it out. By 1930 Hitler had decided that it revealed too much about his intentions, so it was never published.

In 1935 it was locked away at his order in a safe inside an air raid shelter. There it remained until the fall of Germany in 1945, when it was discovered by the American invaders. Its authenticity was reportedly vouched for by Josef Berg and Telford Taylor.

In 1958 the manuscript of the Zweites Buch, having again fallen into obscurity, was rediscovered in American archives by Jewish historian Gerhard Weinberg. Weinberg, whose family left Germany for the United States in 1938, is the author of numerous anti-German academic books and articles and a vigorous Holocaust promoter. He is Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Weinberg strongly supported the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII, which resulted in an enormous number of white deaths.

Unable to find a US publisher for the book, Weinberg turned to a fellow Jew in Germany, Hans Rothfels; a German edition of the Second Book was issued in 1961. (A pirated copy translated into English appeared in New York the following year.) An authoritative English edition did not appear until 40 years later: Gerhard L. Weinberg, ed., Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (New York: Enigma Books, 2003).

Because I had never heard of this book until 2003, I thought the whole story a bit strange. It is unclear how many scholars apart from Weinberg have examined the original manuscript, or what methods of authentication were used. However, David Irving sold the 2003 edition at one of his lectures, and has indicated at least implicitly on several occasions (some quoted here) that he accepts the book as genuine.


David Irving

David Irving’s Hitler’s War is interesting on several levels.

An independent, non-academic historian, Irving has been victimized to an unimaginable degree over many decades by the Jewish power structure, including a global panoply of government agencies, apparatchiks, courts, police, and academic and media shills eternally at its beck and call. His suffering is mind-numbing proof of the bizarre, Orwellian world we live in. Blacklisted and bankrupted, his personal prosperity and former high reputation are in ruins.

His book, as usual, is long: 985 pages (2002 ed.), and again there is the thorny problem of multiple volumes and editions of a single biography floating around. Hitler’s War was first published in 1977, and its prequel, The War Path, in 1978. In 1991 a revised 1-volume edition incorporating both books was issued as Hitler’s War. In 2002, a revised “Millennium Edition” was published under the title Hitler’s War and the War Path, incorporating the latest documents from American, British, and former Soviet archives. This is the one I own.

In an introductory Note Irving states that in the Millennium Edition he has not revised his earlier views, but merely refined the narrative and reinforced the documentary basis of his former assertions.

Famed for working almost exclusively from official archival documents, diaries, private letters, and other original source material, his method has the downside of somewhat impeding smooth narrative flow. However, this is compensated for by the rich source material. Almost incredibly, Irving admits:

I have dipped into Mein Kampf but never read it: it was written only partly by Hitler, and that is the problem. More important are Hitlers Zweites Buch, (1928) which he wrote in his own hand; and Hitler’s Table Talk, daily memoranda which first Heinrich Heim (Martin Bormann’s adjutant, whom I interviewed) and then Henry Picker wrote down at his table side, and the similar table talks recorded by Werner Koeppen (which I was the first to exploit, in Hitler’s War).

In his introduction, notes, and on his website, Irving reveals the care necessary in dealing with even supposedly reliable documentary materials, never mind historians’ work (which he typically ignores). German memoirs, for example, have been extensively tampered with by publishers, Allied authorities, and others. When using them Irving attempts to work from the original typescripts rather than published texts. Even documents contained in government archives have been altered, removed, or otherwise manipulated. His many discussions about such issues are highly instructive.

Irving is not a “Holocaust denier” as Jews claim, though he does not believe in every jot and tittle of their religious narrative as everyone else does.

One of Irving’s most controversial claims is that “antisemitism” in Germany was “a powerful vote catching force,” “an evil steed” that Hitler had no compunction in riding to the chancellorship in 1933. But once in power, “he dismounted and paid only lip service to that part of his Party’s creed.” The “evil gangsters” under him, however—Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels—continued to ride it even when Hitler dictated differently.

Although Irving maintains that a Jewish Holocaust of sorts did occur (unfortunately, he is exceedingly vague, evasive, and even contradictory about its details, and denies any interest in it), he says that Hitler’s evil henchmen dreamed it up and carried it out entirely without Hitler’s knowledge or approval. Thus, while Irving is a Hitlerphile, he is extremely harsh toward “bad guys” like Himmler (in particular), Heydrich, and Goebbels. The reader may perhaps see how Irving’s central thesis is hard to… accept.

Irving has published a critical biography of Goebbels and is currently working on one about Himmler. Himmler’s elderly daughter Gudrun has publicly expressed her fear that Irving will perform a hatchet job on her father in an attempt to salvage his (Irving’s) reputation.

In fairness to Irving, Jewish historian Felix Gilbert, editor of Hitler Directs His War (above), wrote that “during the war, Hitler cut himself off from all his former associates and interests and closed himself in at his headquarters with his military advisers. The center of Hitler’s activities became then the daily conferences on the military situation.” This suggests possible great autonomy on the part of Himmler and others, at least after the inception of the war. Irving, however, tends to emphasize disloyalty, deceit, and manipulation by Himmler and others rather than Hitler’s isolation or distraction. Still, as previously noted, Otto Wagener’s Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant also presents a picture of Hitler’s relationship to his top lieutenants even in the early days of the regime that is similar to Irving’s.

The most important thing to note is that Hitler’s War is not a biography per se, but a military history of WWII from Hitler’s perspective. My primary interest, however, apart from biography, is the racial, political, philosophical, and social aspects of Hitler’s Germany rather than the conduct of the war.


John Toland’s Hitler

La Crosse, Wisconsin-born John W. Toland is another independent scholar who wrote a major biography of Hitler: Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. Something of an intellectual renegade in his later years, he managed to stay beneath the radar screen of controversy. His books remain popular and highly regarded. His best-known book, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (1970), won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Based upon extensive original interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, it was the first book in English to tell the history of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese rather than the American point of view. (Toland married a Japanese woman.)

Toland’s mildly controversial Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982) offered a quasi-revisionist view of the Roosevelt Administration’s scapegoating of the Pearl Harbor commanders and subsequent cover-up. The Pearl Harbor book led to Toland’s association with the Holocaust revisionist Institute for Historical Review (IHR), at whose meeting he spoke.

After Jewish terrorists firebombed the Institute on the Fourth of July, 1984, destroying its warehouse and inventory of books (American authorities “never found”—or punished—the perpetrators), Toland wrote to the IHR:

When I learned of the torching of the office-warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review I was shocked. And when I heard no condemnation of this act of terrorism on television and read no protests in the editorial pages of our leading newspapers or from the halls of academia, I was dismayed and incensed. Where are those defenders of democracy who over the years have so vigorously protested the burning of books by Hitler? Are they only summer soldiers of democracy, selective in their outrage? I call on all true believers in democracy to join me in public denunciation of the recent burning of books in Torrance, California.

Toland’s Adolf Hitler was based upon a great deal of original research, including previously unpublished documents, diaries, notes, photographs, and interviews with Hitler’s colleagues and associates. I have had difficulty identifying a good copy of the biography for sale on Amazon due to the headache of multiple editions and reprints I mentioned earlier.

As near as I can determine, the initial publication was Adolf Hitler, 2 vols. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976). However, sellers often list it for sale on Amazon while really having only one volume (which one is usually undeterminable) in stock. On the other hand, one seller informed me that he checked his 1976 edition in the warehouse, and it appeared to be a complete book in one volume. My impression is that the reprint (I assume it is unrevised), Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Doubleday, 1992), is the same book in a single volume.

Toland’s biography was well-received by both reviewers and the public. In his autobiography Toland wrote that he earned little money from his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rising Sun, but was set for life thanks to the earnings from Adolf Hitler.

Patrick Buchanan penned a column about the book in 1977, after which he was widely condemned for “praising Hitler.” Daniel Weiss of the Virginia Quarterly Review wrote that “In some respects the Hitler who emerges is almost too human, too normal.”

Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review and a longtime WWII revisionist who reads German, writes:

I’m sometimes asked which biography of Hitler I think is best, or which I recommend. In my view, the best single biography of Hitler, and the one I most often recommend, is the one by John Toland, Adolf Hitler. It’s especially good in helping the reader to understand Hitler’s personality and outlook. Kershaw’s biography is detailed, but it’s also very slanted and leaves out a lot.

It would be a mistake to assume that Weber’s recommendation is the result of Toland’s brief connection with the IHR. Adolf Hitler was written several years before that relationship developed. Moreover, in 1977, when David Irving offered a thousand pound reward to anyone who could produce a single wartime document showing that Hitler knew anything about the Holocaust, Toland published an emotional appeal in Der Spiegel urging his fellow historians to refute Irving.

It is unlikely that Toland’s book is “pro-Hitler.” Certainly, reviewers have not attacked it as such.


Conclusion

I guess I’ll go with Toland’s biography, evidently the most objective, despite owning several others instead. Although I’ve only scratched the surface, it is apparent that enormous effort is required to merely survey the field before diving in to actually get a handle on The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived.

And what is the likely outcome of such an effort? Well, David Irving, who has spent the better part of a lifetime studying the Führer, concluded:

What is the result of twenty years’ toiling in the archives? Hitler will remain an enigma, however hard we burrow. Even his intimates realised that they hardly knew him. General Alfred Jodl, his closest strategic adviser, wrote in his Nuremberg cell on March 10, 1946: “I ask myself, did you ever really know this man at whose side you led such a thorny and ascetic existence? To this very day I do not know what he thought or knew or really wanted.”

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